Launching the Lockbox 🔐

🎉 It’s finally here! 🎊 For the past few months NestEgg has been giving speeches and talks, teasing the launch of the Lockbox. Today, we’ve launched the first phase of this pilot, the beginning of a series of iterations we’ll be making to our live ethereum platform, working in the real world, with real people.

So, what’s the Lockbox?

Technology is expensive. There’s so many cool devices and gadgets available on the market, but the price-tag often makes these experiences inaccessible. Unless you’re a core enthusiast, most people don’t want to pay bucko-bucks for an item they’d use just a few hours a week.

That’s why we’re gathering tech enthusiasts working at the Brightlands Smart Services Campus in Heerlen, Netherlands to crowdfund an expensive gadget we all want to use.

We start with a VIVE™ (Virtual Reality).

Yet this crowdfund provides shares of ownership which opens up new possibilities for how this VIVE can be used after it’s bought.

What if you could just pay €10, one time, for an hour a week indefinitely? Once you help crowdfund an item, you don’t need to keep paying to use it, you already bought it (with others).

How will this work?

Individuals crowdfund the gadget they want to share.

The item is stored inside a locked room, secured by a bluetooth smart-lock.

Crowdfunders will receive (tokenized) shares of ownership, which provides free credits each month that can open the lock. Non-crowdfunders can pay to open the lock (and these payments will be distributed among the crowdfunders).

Through this arrangement, a group of individuals can aggregate the funds necessary for purchasing the VIVE. Following the crowdfund, controlled access to the VIVE will be automated using shares of ownership:

1 Ownership token = 1 hour reservation credit a week

If you are in the Brightlands Smart Service Campus, you can join the first crowdfund now! 👉 Get Started at lockbox.nestegg.eu!

Details of the Launch

Our launch will be using the Rinkeby ethereum testnet, accessed through the browser with metamask. Since crowdfunds in NestEgg can extend over several days, we need stable value to purchase items despite ether volatility. While on the Rinkeby testnet, which we’ll issue our own “EURO” tokens which we’ll exchange 1–1 with incoming euros. This lets us start with a foundation of all the economic administration being done transparently. We plan to use stablecoins (like DAI) for when we main-net launch, thus allowing NestEgg to be deployed anywhere in the world.

Additionally, we were grateful to have two benefactors help radically bring down the crowdfund cost to only €300 for the VIVE VR Arcade. We just need to buy a few games.

You’re crowdfunding a VR arcade? Why not crowdfund a windmill or solar panel?

Don’t worry.

The NestEgg goal is to build infrastructure that provides for your basic needs.

But before we move to more expensive projects, this let’s us launch our platform with a lower cost/risk item. This helps us quickly collect the feedback we need and stress test our smart contracts. That way, if we have any critical bugs to fix at the start, it won’t immediately be jeopardizing much larger sums of money.

Launch phases of the Lockbox

We currently have a crowdfund platform that distributes shares of ownership that provide a weekly dividend of reservation credits to open a VR arcade.

Next, we’ll be integrating payments within our platform (iDeal & mainnet Ether) so that non-owners can purchase reservation credits. When these reservation credits are purchased by non-owners, the fee is distributed amongst the holders of ownership tokens. This means when visitors pay for a one-time rent, it’s automatically distributed to the collective who crowdfunded it.

A bit later down the line we’re looking at payment channels as a more robust method of delivering and using dividends. Since dividend payments are often small, and consumed quickly, payment channels might be a solution to make the delivery and consumption fee-less without jeopardizing sovereignty.

What’s Next?

We’re currently organizing the deployment of solar panels and… self-driving pods. We decided to throw our rough draft onto campus and rapidly iterate through the feedback we receive to refine and add features to the platform. The founding crowdfund team will truly be the pioneers of making this radical new sharing economy possible.

Stay tuned Heerlen, the future of blockchain and IoT will arrive here first.